


how babies are made

by bombcollar



Category: NieR: Automata (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Rewrite, Gen, Humor, I just think this scene could have been better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27403348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bombcollar/pseuds/bombcollar
Summary: local robot nerd gives us all a biology lesson.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	how babies are made

2B liked to say there was no point in pondering the answers to impossible questions, questions such as those about the nature of machine consciousness. What did a machine know about the concept of family, of sisterhood, of love? 9S knew about love, or something close enough. He loved the planet they protected. Love was appreciation, fascination, a hunger to learn more he felt was not simply another aspect of the gnawing need to gather information he'd been born with.

"Hey mister, why'd they make the desert?"

"No one _made_ the desert," 9S replies. "It's just an area that lost all its vegetation due to a lack of precipitation."

It goes on like that. Questions about the wind, about the sun, the color of the sky. The desert is vast, and there's nothing to do but hike up the dunes and nothing to listen to but the howl of the wind and the crunch of their footsteps in the sand. There's time to talk, and he doesn't mind explaining. 2B didn't care about geography or weather, and maybe the machine doesn't really care about the answers, either. It doesn't make a difference to 9S, because sometimes it was just nice to have someone to listen. Even a machine.

"Hey mister, how do you make children?"

He hesitates, caught a bit off guard by the question. It was one thing for a machine to ask about how their surroundings were formed, but another to ask about its own origins. "Well, machines can't really make children. Neither can androids, now that I think about it."

"Yeah, but how _do_ you make 'em?"

"If you mean machine children... I really don't know," he confesses. "There's no logical reason any machine should consider itself a child and another an adult when they're all manufactured at the same time. It's something we're still trying to figure out."

"But what about androids? Do you have children?"

"No, all androids are created as the same age they'll always be. We come out of the process knowing exactly who we are and what we're supposed to do. We're not children or adults, we just... are." 

"What about, um..." Little sister pauses thoughtfully, holding her arms out as they skid down a particularly steep dune. "What about birds? What about baby animals?"

"That's... Well, it depends on the animal. In more complex animals like birds, you need two individuals who can provide a sperm and an egg, which come together to make a zygote, and from there the cells keep on multiplying until you have a whole baby, which comes out of the mother's body, either by itself or in an egg that hatches later. Of course-" He can practically see 2B rolling her eyes behind her visor, but he goes on enthusiastically. "Some animals can mate with any other individual of their species, in the case of slugs, for example. Some animals just dump all their sperm and eggs together and hope it works, like fish or corals. Of course, some fish give live birth too. Oh, and then you've got eusocial insects like bees and termites, which have a queen that lays all the eggs... I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of different ways."

"Wow..." The machine murmurs as they approach the rocky tunnel back to the city. "Babies are really complicated." 

**Author's Note:**

> 9S would NOT balk at explaining reproduction and I will die on that hill.


End file.
